Are you for or against the separation of church and state?

[Angrboda]

@summer: I would distinguish between critical thinking skills and study skills, as both appear to be separate skill sets, requiring differrent pedagogical approaches for each. Sadly, educational systems are always in the throes of one fad or another, and it can take a long time and a lot of trial and error to see what sticks to the wall and what doesn't. In my college days, in computers it was all Niklaus Wirth and structured programming; now they teach a totally different set of ideas, because the limitations of focusing on structured programming itself became evident over the course of time. But I suppose this is going to be true regardless of what field you are in, but the cost in human waste can be infuriating and make one sad. (My current therapist is pushing ACT therapy on me, which is an approach that was developed in the decades following the boom in cognitive behavioral therapy. I can see the faddish or trendy side of it, but what am I to do with that information?)

@festive1: The main barrier is that pedagogical approaches which trend in that direction are relatively very expensive to implement. On top of that, educational reform in America in the past century has seen a recurrent theme in which people try to "throw money" at an educational reform issue without any tangible results, so people are skeptical of embracing expensive solutions in education. (Is the "throw money at it problem" real or just an artifact of the rhetoric of educational reform politics? I don't know.) Regardless, schools are underfunded as it is, and a frequent target of "fiscally responsible" politicians; I don't see a readily practical way to embrace such values as those you advocate. (Even if I agreed with them. I neither do, nor don't; given the practical issues involved, I've never gone much further in my analysis. It does sound like a rather simplistic and somewhat reactionary notion to my ears, though.)